You've heard of Twitter, right? Well, in 2008 I found Twitter and fell in love with the idea of to sharing information in real-time and connect with people across the globe. Twitter became my medium. I consumed an endless stream of news, blogs, and ideas, but what was most interesting to me was the people I followed shared links not only from their own blogs, but also from larger sites like Techcrunch and Mashable. Around the time I hopped on the Twitter-wagon, I started a digital strategy agency to help companies grow their online presence. In order for me to become credible in the market of Search and Social Media I had to share my insights with the digital world. I had to write content. My brilliant idea was to create SMEDIUM.com: a hub for content I wrote and shared (the blog title was a play on the words Social+Media+Medium, not a t-shirt size between small and medium). When I started building a curated blog, I immediately wanted to punch walls and/or give up on the idea. I hated trying to come up with original content, and writing long form was a whip. I also wanted posts that were dynamic, not the same old plain-text, paragraph style with a stock image thrown in. But wait, what about Twitter? I loved Twitter because it was content curation maximized, allowing me to discover existing articles, and giving me the ability add my perspective and share in a 140-character tweet.

My frustration led to a thought: What if I could mimic the same process I used on Twitter, but through blogging instead of tweeting? I became my own curator on SMEDIUM.com, publishing articles I found on the web back to the blog and including my perspective, but the process of publishing curated posts on my Wordpress site was manually intensive. As a content producer I learned the key to successful content sharing was giving proper attribution by adding hyperlinks back to the source url and author. This means the author receives credit for their work and the site gets a backlink and attribution for posts. In order to give proper credit, I spent time and energy copy-pasting snippets of articles from original posts. Then there was the problem of curating images. I couldn’t scrape copyrighted images, so I searched for images on Flickr and other sites with creative commons licensing. By the time I’d compiled and curated outside content, I didn’t have the energy to add my own insights. I came to a conclusion: either there had to be a better way or I was going to throw in the towel on curating blogs. That’s where the idea for CherryPick started. In late 2010 I dreamed up an app that would allow me to gather all of my existing feeds and aggregate them into one area, including Google Reader, Facebook, and Twitter. Then I could view that stream of articles and literally “cherrypick” the best articles on the web. From there I could edit the articles and images, tag them properly, and add my thoughts before I published back to my own blog. Cherrypick took minutes to curate content and add insights compared to my previous method of tedious, manual curation. I shared the CherryPick vision with friends and clients, and realized it was more than just a dream, CherryPick was what brands and thought leaders demanded.